LinkedIn is the largest professional networking site in the world. LinkedIn employees presented two sessions about their server architecture at JavaOne 2008. This post contains a summary of these presentations.

Key topics include:

Up-to-date statistics about the LinkedIn user base and activity level

The evolution of the LinkedIn architecture, from 2003 to 2008

"The Cloud", the specialized server that maintains the LinkedIn network graph

I am a big used of Linkedin, and believe that they need to significantly step up the computing power of the servers, or code / db fetching, as a large portion of the day has very slow retrieval time for data.